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Monday, May 2, 2016

Oculus Presents A VR Selfie Stick And Personalized Avatars

Oculus Presents A VR Selfie Stick And Personalized Avatars

Oculus simply want you to do all these; go anywhere in the world instantly, look like yourself, and even take it as a lifestyle and today it displayed how you can achieve all these at F8 conference, San Francisco.

To show how social VR could work, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer and Michael Booth; an engineer strapped into Oculus. They entered Facebook’s new social test bed built with Unity. It’s an alternative to the old Toy Box social space built on Unreal.

Each man had a customized avatar that actually looks like their real-life selves. These were made with an Occipital Structure sensor that can detect both depth and texture.

However, Oculus won’t be releasing this face-capture technology yet. There are issues which is tendency of getting a bad scan, the grotesque result is far worse than some standardized avatar. Eventually, though, the company hopes you’ll be able to just wave your phone in front of your face to capture your look, or use a headset that does it automatically.

Another possibility is for Facebook to be able to recreate your face in VR based on the photos you’ve posted on the social network, though this is still in very early testing.

With a VR selfie stick, you’ll be able to take a photo of your avatar and a friend or other world landmarks. You can even draw on your avatar to add sunglasses or a bow tie. And once you have a photo you like, you can push it into a virtual Facebook mailbox to post it to the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook sees virtual reality as not only the future of gaming and cinema, but also socializing. But that doesn’t mean just looking at a News Feed in VR. Facebook and Oculus are trying to build native social experiences on the virtual plane.

VR will cause transformative shifts just the way mobile did. What if you could interview for jobs around the country without leaving home, and even obscure age, gender, and race so you could be hired because of your merits, not how you look.

Not everyone can afford to travel to see family or visit the wonders of the world. But as the price of truly immersive and interactive virtual reality like the Oculus Rift comes down, you’ll be able to feel like you’re in the same room as your loved ones, and then go anywhere together.

The VR Selfie Stick is most certainly promising. I won't be surprised if it becomes such a huge hit. Technology has gone a long way and has truly made our lives easier, less boring. I'm hoping that VR would go beyond Facebook & serve something bigger.